Saturday, December 19, 2015

Prohibition in Republics Likely to Accelerate Russian Flight

Paul Goble

Staunton,
December 19 – Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Khloponin has responded favorably
to requests from North Caucasian leaders to change Russian law so that they can
limit or even ban the sale of alcohol in their republics by calling on the
trade ministry to come up with amendments to existing legislation that will allow
just that.

If
approved, that change will be popular among those Muslims who do not drink; but
it will almost certainly have another consequence Moscow may not yet have faced
up to: Prohibition in the republics will only accelerate the outflow of ethnic
Russians from them, making them more mono-ethnic and thus less easily
controlled from the outside.

The
only limiting factor, if one may call it that, is that the republics where the
introduction of this measure is most likely are those like Chechnya where the
share of ethnic Russians is already miniscule rather than in others where the
fraction of ethnic Russians in the population is higher.

Chechnya’s
Ramzan Kadyrov has been pressing for such a change for several years, and both
he and the leaders of several other predominantly Muslim republics have already
have been allowed to impose severe limitations in the sale of alcoholic
beverages in their areas during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

If
Khloponin’s request leads to a change of the law, Chechnya is thus the most
likely republic to introduce prohibition. Ingushetia is likely to be next, with
Daghestan the third most likely, and other north Caucasus republics more likely
to introduce restrictions rather than outright bans.